Palm Announces Summer SDK, webOS Updated

With recent buzz on the Pre due to its release, Palm has been the word on the street. Many new Pre owners are excited for the Mojo SDK to begin developing applications for the platform, but Palm announced that the SDK in question won’t be ready until this coming summer. In other related news, webOS has now seen its first update after the Palm Pre release: 1.0.3.Palm regretfully says that, despite the many people who may want to develop for webOS, the SDK simply isn’t ready for the wide audience right now. They intend to keep working towards the goal and complete it in stages when it will finally be released to the general public this summer. The stages in between include, from Palm:

• Beginning immediately, we’ll accelerate the growth of the early access program, expanding as quickly as resources allow. Over the next few weeks, the program will grow from hundreds to thousands of developers.
  
• Simultaneously, we’ll begin publishing more content outside the early access program, and we’ll launch new confidentiality rules that will allow early Mojo developers to communicate more freely with the rest of the world.
  
• As soon as we can, we’ll open the SDK to all legitimate requests.

Palm has already given early editions of the SDK to a relatively small group of people through the Mojo Early Access Program and is now granting a wider audience the access.

The linked post also mentions that because the Pre is already so popular, hacking it is inevitable. In veiled terms, Palm seems to be issuing a faint warning against people who may “experiment” a little too far in the webOS , and that they ought to “stick to the code,” as the pirates say. I think that the rules are more like guidelines, anyway; crossing any official boundaries shouldn’t be a problem (for those not humorously inclined: it’s a poor joke).

As on any popular platform, we recognize that some developers will experiment in ways that cross official boundaries, but we believe that our formal offerings – and community efforts built around those offerings – will provide the best experience for the vast majority of webOS developers and users.

Jailbreaking activities aside, Palm has released the webOS 1.0.1 source code for geeks and enthusiasts to enjoy.

Boundary-crossing or no, users of the new Palm Pre will be gloriously happy to find that an update has already been issued for webOS. It’s now at a grand 1.0.3 with a few new helpful features having to do with syncing with Google Calendar, bugs in the alarm clock, syncing with contacts online, enhanced power performance, a new supported mail server type (non-SSL EAS), and other miscellaneous features and fixes.